1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to the field of mobile web access.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mobile web access, or accessing web content on a web browser executing on a handheld mobile device has become commonplace. Mobile web access however, suffers from several limitations and usability problems related to mobile devices' small screen size, limited bandwidth and limited processing capability. The small screen size of a handheld mobile device makes it difficult to render text and graphics configured to be viewed on a standard size desktop computer screen. The limited bandwidth available to handheld mobile devices combined with limited processing capabilities pose additional challenges in delivering a satisfactory web browsing experience to user because of the long page load and refresh times. For example, an independently processing web browser executing on a mobile device would take a very long time to process and load content rich webpages (or web pages).
One solution to overcome the above limitations is to use a proxy server to speed up webpage load times. Proxy servers access web content, process the content and deliver the processed content of a smaller data size to the mobile device. Because the web browser functions are processed in the proxy server, the mobile device can retrieve the web content from the proxy server much faster than it can from accessing web content and processing it locally.
However, processing web content on a proxy server poses several issues, including issues with the delivery of the browsing experience to the client user, such as interacting with the webpage. For example, if the user interacts with the webpage, the mobile device must instruct the proxy server to interact with the webpage in the same manner. Subsequently, the proxy server must process the webpage according to the instructions and transmit the processed data to the requesting mobile device. The process therefore greatly increases the latency within the system evident to the user and provides a poor web browsing experience.